


Winter Lights

by the_moonmoth



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Drama, F/M, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Series, Recovery, Vampire Slayer(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-30 01:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5145014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_moonmoth/pseuds/the_moonmoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life, death, love, grief. Buffy takes a mission in the Arctic Circle with a slayer who never wanted to be and an enemy that barely compares to the one inside her own head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Whatever important place a hedgehog would have to go.

**Author's Note:**

> **Setting:** Set shortly after ‘The Girl In Question’ and imagining it took place a little earlier than its air date.  
>  **Warnings:** Attempted suicide and character death (both off-screen, but discussed)  
>  **Notes:**  
>  \- Inspired heavily by the London Grammar song [Sights.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBxxEyVIdO4)  
> \- This is a very personal story and a lot of people helped me out with it along the way. My very great thanks go to angearia for looking over an early version, torrilin for answering my questions about huskies, and yavannie82 and bewildered for excellent and comprehensive betaing, through which they have made this fic so tight it could float. Bottomless appreciation also to kylathelurker for a superlative alpha-read, cultural input and seemingly unending support and enthusiasm. They all helped me make this as good and as accurate as possible – any remaining mistakes are my own.  
> \- Further thanks to my lovely, generous and incredibly talented artists kylathelurker, wolveswithhats and bewildered who have produced some truly stunning illustrations for this story. If you enjoy their work along with mine, I hope you will remember to let them know :)  
> \- Constructive criticism is always welcome, and in fact encouraged. Enjoy.

_I have this dream, different every time but still kind of the same. I’m in a crowded place, like a mall or the bleachers just before the game starts or something. It’s like that scene in The Matrix when Morpheus takes Neo into the construct for the first time and they’re walking down the busy sidewalk, constantly jostled ‘cause they’re going against the tide. Like that. Faces everywhere and they’re all going the opposite way to me. And I know I’m chasing after something important because my Spidey-sense is going nuts, but the closer I get to it, the thicker the crowd becomes. It’s only when I’m completely stationary, hemmed in by bodies, that I catch sight of him, a half-turned face in the crowd, heading away from me. I call out for him, yell and scream, but he doesn’t stop, just his bleached head disappearing in the press of people until he’s gone._

_Yeah. Not so much a dream as a nightmare. But at least in this one he doesn’t burn._

 

***

 

Bath is quiet at one in the morning on a weeknight. No tourist bustle, no traffic, pubs long closed. Buffy had forgotten this part from before, the weird walk across town from the garage Giles keeps his car in because his listed townhouse apartment doesn’t have parking. It’s been a long day of paper and planning at the new Council HQ in Oxford, but this walking down dark streets is surprisingly pleasant. Hands in her pockets against the late spring chill, Buffy smiles faintly in nostalgia for days gone by.

 

At her side, Giles is quiet as well, a strange mirror of her with his hands pushed deep in his coat. For a moment she’s taken as far back as the early days of Sunnydale, when he would patrol with her. It feels so distant in memory that it’s like something ancient, bobbing up for a moment before receding once more under the weight of everything that’s passed since then. It was never this cold in old Sunny-D, though; it still amazes her how April in England can feel like winter.

 

Giles catches her looking at him out of the corner of her eye, raising his eyebrows slightly in question. She shrugs it off, unprepared just now for anything beyond this easy, wordless communication. After months and months with no one but Dawn for regular company, the silence feels soothing. Not that she doesn’t love Dawn and their life in Rome, because she does, but sometimes...

 

The thing is, Dawn talks. About her feelings, her regrets, her hopes; a seemingly endless stream of words and emotions. And she’s good with them, expressive, like— like an expressive person. Sometimes Buffy’s envy runs so deep it cuts her. Giles’s call to visit the Council for the consultation had been timely; she needs space to breath.

 

The apartment – _flat_ – is in a honey-stone, slate-roofed building that might well be older than the town she saw sink into the ground just under a year ago. It’s one of a row of houses not far from the Royal Crescent, and grand enough that Dawn had snorted her Starbuck’s through her nose the first time they’d seen it. Inherited, Giles had said. Re-mortgaged, she later found out. For the gift that kept her floating that awful year she’d begun by clawing her way from the grave and never really felt as though she’d stopped. Kept her floating for a little while, at least, until something else came along.

 

She shakes herself out of the direction those thoughts lead, makes herself jump tracks. Thinks back on the day’s meetings and the situation in the Arctic instead. Who ever heard of two apocalypses going down at once? After last year’s bonus experience, she’d really been hoping for a quiet spring that resulted in nothing more than a quiet summer. Quiet on the demon front, at least. There had been definite beach plans, and clubbing plans, and probably shopping plans too. But Faith and her corps have been sent down to India and most of the rest are back at the ranch, guarding the Cleveland hellmouth. Everyone else that they know of is either still in the Academy in Rome, or an obsolete. She’s spent all afternoon arguing with the Council over who to send north, who’s ready, who can be spared, shuffling girls here and girls there. There’s no good answer. It’s just the kind of problem Buffy needs right now to fill her mind right up.

 

“Will you join me for a nightcap?” Giles asks as he opens the door onto the hallway, shoes clacking on red and blue quarry tiles.

 

Buffy shrugs out of her coat, tosses it on the newel post. “Nah,” she says, moving for the stairs. “I’m beat, think I’m just gonna turn in.”

 

Giles’s apartment is just the first and second floors of the house, but it’s homey in a musty, dark-wood-and-books kind of way, and though their relationship is still not quite what it once was – perhaps never will be – she’d rather stay here than some sterile hotel room.

 

She showers, forced into taking her time by the feeble trickle from the geriatric pipes, and changes into her pajamas. It’s not exactly late by her standards but she’s tired enough she feels like she could sleep, and the bed in the guest room is just as comfortable as she remembers. Only, she ends up lying there, staring at the ceiling in the dark with wide, aching eyes, mind not nearly full enough.

 

She wonders why she thought tonight would be any different.

 

*

 

After a little while, Buffy becomes aware of music. It’s nothing she can make out from up here, just a soft beat and a few tinkling high notes, but for a moment it puts the brakes on her mental hamster wheel and even though she really doesn’t want company, she rises and pulls a sweater over her head.

 

The stairs creak so stealth is out, but she tries to come down quietly anyway, one hand on the smooth wooden banister, stocking feet on the threadbare runner. The lights are on in the sitting room, low and warm, and that’s where the music is coming from. Closer, she can hear it now, something old that she recognizes but can’t put a name to, upbeat but at the same time, strangely angry. Antiquarian that he is, Giles doesn’t own a CD player or even a tape deck, just an ancient turntable and encyclopedic collection of LPs that she’d once dared Xander to use for Frisbee, a lifetime ago. The sound quality is really bad, full of pops and hisses, but Buffy has always kind of liked that. It’s homey, like an open fire.

 

Slowly, she walks down the hall and pauses in the doorway, assessing. Giles is sitting with his back to her in his favorite armchair, feet propped on the battered coffee table, crossed at the ankle. It’s an uncharacteristically casual pose and she feels a little uncomfortable seeing it, reminded vividly that she is just a visitor in his home. Transitory. Little more than a ghost, really.

 

“Buffy? I thought I heard you coming down.” Giles cranes his neck to look over the chairback at her, feet lowering from the table in apparent reflex. “Everything all right?”

 

She shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep. Heard the music.”

 

He doesn’t reply, but nods, gesturing for her to make herself comfortable on the couch. She feels sad about him being all proper again, and lingers in the doorway, hesitating as static marks the end of the song.

 

“I was going to put some tea on,” he says eventually when she doesn’t move. “Would you like some? Maybe something herbal to help you sleep.”

 

“Uh, sure,” she says distantly, captivated all of a sudden by the next song on the album. It’s simple, voice and piano, and it makes the air freeze in her lungs. Without warning she’s back in the crypt, naked skin against rough woolen rug, satin blanket body-warmed and pulled up to her shoulders. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone to sleep – passed out – so he must have fetched it for her. She doesn’t want to think about that right now, what it means, just as she doesn’t want to think about him, just wants to lie quiet and still. But he hasn’t let her be, not at all – he’s lying right there, at her back, not touching (he’s learned not to do that) but close. She can feel his eyes on her, even with hers closed, feel the rumble of his breath as he sings softly, low in his throat. She doesn’t recognize the song, not really, only it sounds a little like something Mom used to listen to, when her parents were still together. When her mom was still alive. But she doesn’t want to think about that either. There’s the lightest tug on her hair and she realizes he must be touching the ends, threading his fingers through the length of it, and she can’t allow that, there are rules. But his voice is gravelly and somehow sweet, and she’s comfortable, warm, and still so tired. The urge to float and not-think is overpowering. So she keeps her eyes closed and thinks of nothing until she can drift back off to oblivion.

 

“Let it out and let it in,” she whispers now, in time with the singer, and feels her throat close over.

 

“Buffy?” Giles asks. “Buffy?” Somehow he’s at her shoulder, large, warm hand covering her fingers. “Let go, you’ll hurt yourself.”

 

“What?” Looking, she sees her hand, white-knuckled on the door jamb so that the wood is starting to splinter. It takes a surprising amount of effort to relax her grip, let Giles gently pry her fingers away one by one.

 

“What am I saying? You’ll be fine, it’s my door I should be worried about,” he mutters, leading her to the couch. He makes her sit, pressing something into her hands that turns out not to be tea but a measure of Scotch. He doesn’t bother asking if she’s okay, and she’s grateful for that because she’d only lie and probably not very convincingly right now. Instead, he sits beside her, and when he does speak, he says, “Music is a powerful trigger to the memory, you know. The right song, even just a particular combination of notes or lyrics, has the power to take one back to something, well, something you’d thought long forgotten. A place, or, or the person you were with when you first heard it. It’s not… it’s not unusual to have a reaction like this, Buffy.”

 

“I—I—” she tries, but she can’t, she just can’t. She doesn’t know what Giles thinks is happening, but the words in her head, the only words that will come out if she opens her mouth, are not words he will want to hear. _He used to sing this to me. When I was drowning. When I hated him because it was easier than hating myself. When I put marks on his skin with loathing, so that he would put them back on me – after that, sometimes. When he thought I was sleeping. He used to sing this to me. He used to sing this._

 

Rubbing her fingertips mindlessly over the glass in her hands, Buffy listens in silence right to the end of the track. It goes on a long time, trumpets and drums now, and the kind of slow fade out you don’t really get anymore, and when there’s nothing but static she looks up at Giles and asks him if they can listen again. When he rises to do so, something in Buffy slowly begins to calm down and she shuffles herself further into the couch cushions and leans her head back, staring at the ceiling. The music starts and she mouths along, “Any time you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain, don't carry the world upon your shoulders.” The faint scent of the whiskey rises up from her glass and though she never could stand to drink the stuff, she holds onto it for now, touches the liquid to her lips, sweet burn, and closes her eyes.

 

*

 

She doesn’t sleep at all that night, waiting for the sunrise alone at the kitchen table. It’s not unprecedented. Giles went up to bed long ago and there’s nothing but the steady tick of a carriage clock for company. The flat has garden access, being at ground level, and at some point as the sky first starts to lighten from black to darkest blue Buffy opens up the French doors and steps outside. The grass is cold and wet with dew between her bare toes and she stands, hands clasped around a steaming mug of coffee, staring down with faint surprise at the sensation. As though, caught up in her head, she’d forgotten she has feet.

 

“Hi feet, how ya doing?” she murmurs, wiggling them a little, before laughing softly at herself because seriously? She’s talking to her _feet._ Can long-term sleep deprivation cause brain damage? Maybe she should think about those pills the Academy doctor prescribed her when she gets back. Well, she’ll be home soon, couple of days at most, back in the apartment she shares with Dawn that she absolutely does not find suffocating, because what does that say about her if she still can’t coexist with her own baby sister? Back in the job they gave her because she told them she didn’t want to slay anymore, _just watch my eyes and pay no attention to the slayer behind the curtain, nope, no way she’s slipping out to get her violence on behind your backs_. Back to dancing and lunch dates in the piazza and… Giancarlo, the Immortal, whatever.

 

Dawn… god, she’d known Dawn hadn’t liked him, but she hadn’t realized the seething depths of her hatred until that day, last week, the same day Giles had called and Buffy had hopped on a plane to England rather than deal with her sister’s technicolor emotions.

 

*

 

“You’re a real asshole, you know,” Dawn said casually as Buffy came into the kitchen to refresh the popcorn bowl.

 

The words were so cold, so unexpected, it stopped Buffy in her tracks. “I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about Kill Bill,” she said cautiously, unsure how her quiet night in with her boyfriend had provoked this. “Guess you can’t really appreciate it from another room, though, huh?”

 

“Right, like I wanna be in the same room as _that_.” She turned carelessly to the fridge, perusing its contents, but at Buffy’s confused silence she turned back, eyes narrowed. “Getting all snuggly? With the _Immortal?_ In our _home_.” The shake of her head set her long ponytail swinging, minutely calculated to convey absolute distaste.

 

“What?” Buffy asked, appealing to the ceiling for patience. This was an argument older than their current situation, and she was so very sick of it. “What am I doing wrong now? You said you didn’t want me to hide things from you anymore, so here’s me, not hiding. Did I do it wrong somehow? Is Giancarlo invisible?”

 

“If only.”

 

Buffy sighed and pushed past her sister, scooping up what she came for from the kitchen counter. “That’s just great, Dawnie. Really mature.”

 

Dawn waited until Buffy was at the door to the living room before going for the real gut punch. “You know you’re just doing this stuff with him because you were too scared to do it with—”

 

“Don’t.” Buffy half turned, flashing a finger out in warning. “Don’t you dare. He would’ve wanted me to learn from my mistakes.”

 

“Oh yeah, you learned all right. You learned _so quickly_ you might actually be top of the class. Genius Buffy finally gets an A in relationships.”

 

“I’m sorry you have regrets, Dawnie, really, I am, but none of that’s on me,” she said tiredly. “Maybe if you just—” but Dawn’s eyes had filled with resentful tears, sudden as a rainstorm, and before Buffy could finish she’d made a run for her room, the slam of the door making the glassware rattle.

 

*

 

A nearby hedge rustles, catching Buffy’s attention back to the present, and without thinking she reaches for her waistband before remembering she’s in her pajamas, and stake-less. It doesn’t matter – the creature of the night reveals itself to be small, round and surprisingly speedy, zipping past her bare feet to the flower beds. Silently, she steps forward before crouching down for a closer look in the dim pre-dawn light. It’s a hedgehog, snuffling around the damp earth for a snack. Buffy watches, mindlessly enchanted by the whiffling nose, the dainty paws.

 

After only a few moments it seems to become aware of being watched, and its industry comes to an abrupt halt. Some small change, a shifting breeze or creak of knee, must have given her away, and now the little creature is frozen, waiting: fight or flight. It’s a reaction Buffy’s used to inspiring.

 

“Boo,” she tells it, and quick as lightning it curls up into a prickly little ball. Reaching out, she gives it a gentle prod, then, curious, rolls it over. The hedgehog is turned so tightly in on itself it’s presenting nothing but spines to the world. A sudden pang of envy sidles out of the shadows, but on its heels comes the question, somewhat disconnected, of whether all that rolling up ever gets tiring; if it gets in the way of actually going someplace. Whatever important place a hedgehog would have to go.

 

*

 

Giles rises with the sun, and Buffy tells him then, “I’ll take the mission.”

 

“Indeed?” he asks calmly. “I thought you had retired from active service.”

                      

She licks her lips – taste of Scotch, fresh air and sleeplessness. “Well unretire me, because I’m going to the North Pole.”


	2. Whatever important place a hedgehog would have to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Illustration by [kylathelurker](http://kylathelurker.livejournal.com/)

 

 _The only reason I know what went down with Adam is from the dreams I had after. Not the scary First Slayer, random cheese guy dream, but later. There’s always some element of processing after a big fight. Things happen fast and I react on instinct, so it’s like… decompression, sorting through thoughts and feelings, things I didn’t have time for when it was all going down. Except I have no actual memory of that fight once the spell kicked in, so all I know about it is from my sleeping mind which, I’ll be honest, is not exactly the sanest place. But there’s this one image that has come back to me again and again over the years – rising to stand before Adam, completely defenseless, but deflecting his bullets with a wave of my hand. The air shimmers and my eyes feel bright and hot like they have laser beams shining out of them or something, and the bullets turn to doves. Then my voice comes, but it’s amplified, folded back and back on itself like a Jacob’s ladder, and suddenly I can feel them, my sisters, the slayers who came before me, standing at my shoulder in an unbroken line all the way back to the Sartorially-Challenged One. And we speak._ You could never hope to grasp the source of our power.

_Maybe it didn’t exactly happen that way, I don’t know. Bespelled Buffy brain is capable of some serious weirdness. But those words, in that hundred-voice, I can’t shake it. Because I know. It took me another year to realize it, and then another two years to realize it again, but now I finally know what we meant. Feel it. The source of our power: that terrible, burning love. Brighter than the fire._

_I’ve heard burning is the most painful way to die. I thought I heard him laughing, even so. Poetic irony or whatever it’s called – he burned, I just self-immolated._

 

***

 

It only strikes her later that Giles might well have intended this outcome the entire time, the crafty old… watcher guy. Still, it’s the best solution and the fact that she didn’t see it earlier is really kinda weird and speaks to way too much time on her butt in her plushy Academy office. But, gap year aside, she’s still got the skill and experience of a whole cadre of newby slayers and is used to leading and organizing groups, plus she won’t have to be transferred from somewhere crucial. There’s someone up there already, a native contact who can take her to the coven and serve as backup, and with a bit of magical assistance she can sneak enough weapons through security to make the pair of them a bristling, two-person army. Strangely, she’s kinda looking forward to it.

 

She can’t leave without speaking to Dawn, though. Buffy’s been putting it off since she arrived and doesn’t feel any less reluctant to deal with things now, but despite the calm sense of purpose that’s settled over her ever since she made the decision to go, she’s not stupid enough to think there’s no danger.

 

There’s a long load of nothing on the other end of the phone line when she tries to explain what’s what.

 

“Dawn?” she tries. “Dawnie? You still there?” Silence. “Look, are you gonna be okay by yourself while I’m gone? ‘Cause I don’t know how long it’s going to be. You could always go stay with Marta for a while, at least until Andrew’s back, I’m sure her mom wouldn’t mind.” Silence. It’s like when she was thirteen and thought the silent treatment was the ultimate in sibling punishment. Buffy sighs, picturing her sister’s angry face all too easily, the powerlessness that underlies it. If she were a better sister, she wouldn’t go. She’d fly back to Rome and smooth things over and give Dawn the stability she craves. She knows that’s what she should do, but she can’t make the decision take hold within her. Anyway, it’s not like Dawn’s a baby anymore – she’s eighteen now, definitely old enough to take care of herself for a couple of weeks. God, with Buffy and her pesky boyfriend out of her hair she’ll probably have more fun than she’s had all year. It’s what Buffy would have done if she was a normal eighteen-year-old at home by herself. And it’s not like Buffy being there before made everything so great for her. “Well, I’ve got to go pack, so—”

 

“Wait!”

 

Buffy pauses. “Dawn?”

 

“Wait, Buffy, just… don’t go without…”

 

She sounds weird, like the words are being torn out of her; like she’s scared. It’s so utterly _not_ what Buffy expected that she feels herself soften like butter. “It’ll be fine,” she soothes, “it’s no big, just a couple of warlocks getting too friendly with the dark magicks. I’ll be back before you know it.”

 

“Yeah, because powerful warlocks getting hopped up on dark mojo have always been so easy to deal with in the past.” Beneath the sarcasm, which is pretty feeble by Dawn’s high standards, her voice is small enough that she really could be thirteen again, that sweet-faced little girl who’d already seen way too much of the world’s ugliness.

 

“Right,” Buffy says. “Easy peasy.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Dawn blurts. “About before, with the Imm— uh, with Giancarlo. I was a complete bitch and I didn’t mean… you know…” Down the phone line it sounds as though she’s taking a steadying breath. “I love you. You know that, right?”

 

“I know, sweetheart. Love you too.”

 

“I just… I didn’t want you to leave still thinking that I… that I didn’t.”

 

Ah, so that’s what this is about. She wonders vaguely why the ache is absent, why she can’t feel even an echo of sympathy for her little sister.

 

“I’ll always know that,” Buffy says, trying to be reassuring, trying to be all of the things she should be but isn’t.

 

*

 

Forty-eight hours and many hurried Council meetings later, Buffy’s en route to Alaska. It strikes her as the stewardess serves their dinner that she’s seen more of Europe than her home country – this’ll be only the fourth state she’s ever visited. Even Faith has seen more of the US than that. Not that Alaska is anything like the rest of the country, a fact that becomes patently clear after the connection in Fairbanks, where the plane feels smaller than the school bus they escaped the hellmouth on, and shudders alarmingly with every little gust of wind. She tries to take her mind off her juddering stomach by studying the handful of fellow passengers instead, and with the beginnings of nameless unease, notices a bunch of serious, weather-beaten faces in well-worn cold weather gear, all drab colors and sewn-on patches of flags and peaks conquered. The guy across the aisle from her has an “Everest Base Camp” patch sewn onto the khaki backpack between his booted feet and she feels her eyes go wide.

 

“Everest, huh?” she says when he catches her looking, trying for casual, the effect definitely spoiled by the way she grips the armrests of her seat when the plane chooses that moment to lurch abruptly downwards.

 

“Oh, yeah. I was supposed to go up but I got the call for this gig,” the guy says modestly, gesturing at his bag – kind of like a huge camera case, on second look. He has a British accent, but she’s pretty used to that these days. Doesn’t even bat an eyelash. Nope, not a single lash batted, not this slayer. She’s completely and utterly bat-less. Definitely no innards squeezing painfully at the tone, the timbre of his voice.

 

“You’re a… photographer?” she guesses.

 

“Cameraman,” he corrects with a smile. “I’m shooting arctic foxes for a documentary. I’m Greg, by the way.”

 

“Buffy.”

 

He smiles again, and she forces one back. “So how about you?” He eyes her shiny new ski jacket. “Scientist? Doctor? You don’t look like an oil kind of girl…”

 

She blinks. A doctor? Her? That’s pretty laugh-worthy for someone who never even finished college. “Uh, explorer, I guess. Parts unknown, call of the wild, that kind of thing.”

 

 _Right_ , says a sardonic inner voice. _Vampires, demons, the root of all evil – parts unknown is one way of putting it. Here there be bloody dragons._

 

“Yeah?” Greg smiles again. It’s friendly and encouraging, eyes crinkling at the corners. “You must have some good stories.”

 

 _Don’t_ , she wants to say _. Forget about me, just keep talking_. _Just keep smiling and talking, and I’ll close my eyes and the world will be better for a few minutes._ But no, it’s time for Buffy’s brain to dig her out of the hole Buffy’s mouth has gotten her into.

 

“Sure,” she says, turning up her own smile a couple notches. Adds a sharp scimitar edge to it, unwelcoming, the opposite of his. Force fields up – check. “I guess I must. But my publisher, you know. There’s contracts and stuff. If I told you, I’d have to leave a hatchet in your skull.”

 

Greg sits back, mildly stung. That inner voice laughs, possibly _at_ her, and Buffy thinks how it’s kind of sad that she’s been down into the bowels of the Earth but never in the opposite direction. No commemorative patches for Buffy’s adventures, not unless you count the kind that hold guts in, and they probably wouldn’t look so good on her carry-on.

 

*

 

Her teeny tiny plane touches down in a place called Endurance. She’d thought the name amusing in England, but flying in over the flat, white landscape Buffy has gained an inkling of comprehension. The airport is barely more than a shed, and even though it’s getting close to ten at night, local time, the sky outside is a bright, deep blue. A guy with a dayglo yellow vest over his jacket hands Buffy her luggage – no carousel here – and then she’s on her own.

 

It doesn’t take long to spot the woman, given the postage-stamp dimensions. She’s holding a sign with Buffy’s name on it, the only one of its kind here. The other passengers move about with purpose, and Buffy thinks, _Could I be any more of a tourist?_ Suddenly, the bright red jacket and D &G sunglasses pushed up on her head make her feel painfully self-conscious in a way that’s been threatening since the plane. The expression on the face above the sign suggests that this is the correct state of affairs.

 

 

“Huh,” the woman says, as Buffy approaches, “thought you’d be taller.”

 

So it’s like that. Nice. Well, she’s just got off her third flight after nearly a whole day of travelling. She’s tired and grimy and could really do without the frigid (pun most definitely intended) reception. “All the better to kick your knees out,” she retorts easily. “You know, if you’re a demon.” _Or a really annoying smartass_ , she lets her face say.

 

The woman looks both unimpressed and faintly amused. “Bridget Aguta Stevenson.”

 

“Buffy Summers.”

 

“Yeah, hotshot, I think I got that,” she says, dumping the sign with ‘Buffy Summers’ on it in the trash.

 

They don’t shake hands.

 

*

 

Bridget leads her out to some kind of vehicle that might ostensibly be termed a car, but looks more like some kind of Mars rover. Despite the bright sun – and reflecting off the snow it makes Buffy squint even from behind her shades – the air is so cold it hurts the back of her throat. She’s seen snow in Europe – she and Dawn were in Germany for Christmas, Switzerland for much of January – and there was that one time in Sunnydale, of course, but this is something else. It feels weird underfoot, compacting with a strange squeak against her boot soles, unexpected friction making her unbalanced and slow.

 

“Get in,” Bridget tells her, looking faintly pissed off at Buffy’s lollygagging (oh god, too much time with Giles) and walks around to the driver’s side. It takes three attempts to get up onto the running board, layers of insulation, the shortness of her legs, and gravity all conspiring to make her look foolish. Swinging herself in finally, she claps her hands together a few times, trying to ward away the worrying numbness already starting in at her fingertips, a little alarmed that even inside the SUV-truck-thing she can still see her breath clouding in front of her face.

 

Despite the rush to get going from England, she’d felt well prepared. Not so much anymore.

 

“Shoulda put my gloves on,” she mutters sheepishly, digging in her carry-on. Bridget’s look of vague annoyance remains, but as she pulls out onto something that looks more like a snowboarding half-pipe than a road, she reaches over and turns up the heat, so Buffy allows that she might not be so bad. Maybe that’s just her face or something, the same way Willow’s face naturally settles into an expression of hapless goodwill (when she’s not all dark and veiny, or white-haired and glowy, neither of which has happened recently) or Giancarlo always looks like he’s smiling. Working theory tentatively accepted, she decides to try and break the ice. Metaphorically speaking.

 

“So, uh… is this just the airport taxi service or are you my Council contact?”

 

“I’m your contact.”

 

“Right. And you… have some, uh, skill or something?” God she’s tired, brain no worky. Somewhere there are words that mean what she means to mean. But from the look Bridget’s giving her right now, it doesn’t seem like she’s going to cut her any slack.

 

“Besides the ability to navigate leads and shifting sea ice while not freezing to death?”

 

Buffy scrutinizes her, the round face, high cheekbones, wide mouth – a classic Aboriginal beauty. Possibly. If she ever smiled. Weren’t those survival-y type things second nature?

 

“I _meant_ like magic, or an encyclopedic knowledge of the enemy,” she says, trying not to get defensive.

 

Bridget snorts softly. “Nope. Just me, my dogs and my sled. Oh, and my super strength. Heard I’ve got you to thank for that.”

 

There’s venom in her tone, buried but there. Buffy spent six months last year rounding up new slayers – she’s seen the full range of reactions and nothing really touches her anymore. Still, Bridget’s at least the same age as her, and could easily be ten years older – she’s got one of those faces her mother would have called ‘timeless’ so it’s hard to tell. Not that Buffy’s ever been particularly good with judging that kind of thing. Too much time spent around vampires, probably. Anyway, not exactly a slayer.

 

“You’re an obsolete,” she says without thinking.

 

“That what you’re calling us nowadays?”

 

Buffy winces. The girls came up with the term and unfortunately it’s stuck. Kind of appropriate, though. When they had done that spell a year ago to release all the potentials to full slayerhood, they hadn’t realized at the time that it really would be _all_ the potentials. Even those whose chance of being called had been and gone. Cops and teachers and old ladies on the Russian Steppe who could suddenly beat up men twice their size and a fraction of their age. The difference was, something in the fact of their having been passed over the first time made their power somehow less. They were stronger than regular humans, sure, and had all the usual healing and demon-sensing abilities, but they were like second-class slayers – slower, weaker, more easily defeated. Not to mention, given their ages, most had careers, families, lives they couldn’t or wouldn’t leave behind for a Slayer Academy full of teenage girls. So some – not many – had been brought in as staff at the Academy, some had been funneled into the more flexible watcher training, a handful went out slaying in teams (Buffy still wasn’t over the sight of a retired nurse in her sixties staking a fledgling in the middle of St. Peter’s Square) and the rest were monitored to make sure they weren’t abusing their power, but were otherwise left alone.

 

“Watchers didn’t fill you in, huh?” Bridget says into the long pause.

 

“I guess not. I kinda left in a hurry.” Maybe someone had mentioned it – by the time she’d left Buffy had been on information overload, all nonessential items to the escape pods. There’s also the fact that she tries not to think about the obsoletes when she can avoid it. Too depressing, how few there are (and how many in jail). “So you help the Council?” she prods cautiously. Obsoletes could be prickly about their status and hey! Maybe _that_ explains the perma-frown.

 

“I help this once,” Bridget says flatly. “One time deal.”

 

That rings alarm bells, but Buffy feels she’s poked this bear enough for one day so she leaves it be. Giles wouldn’t send her to work with someone who wasn’t trusted, and from what she understands, they’ve got a couple of weeks ahead of them with nothing but each other for company. She’ll figure it out.

 

Then that thought catches up with her and Buffy sighs, imagining days on end of that grim face, and decides on one more attempt at making nice.

 

“I wrote a report on the Inuit once in High School. Kinda cool to be meeting one in the flesh.”

 

Bridget gives her a cutting look, one eyebrow cocked. “What makes you think I’m Inuit?”

 

“Oh. You aren’t?”

 

“Well.” She frowns again. “Yes. But that’s not the point.”

 

Buffy stifles a smirk. Point to the slayer, at last. One of the slayers. Whatever. If they’re not going to be on friendly terms, she’ll take the satisfaction of fighting back any day. God, this woman is bringing out her inner bitch like no one but Cordelia.

 

“So. Bridget,” she muses, trying not to be too self-satisfied and probably failing. “That’s an interesting name. Not very…” Both eyebrows rise this time, almost daring her to continue, and somehow Buffy realizes that ‘exotic’ is not the way she wants to finish that sentence. “It’s a pretty name,” she amends quickly, ego promptly deflated.

 

“Only one I got,” Bridget replies, “but I tell you what, as a favor from one slayer to another, feel free to call me Sleeps With Seals or whatever takes your fancy.” It’s said with a cool, sharp wit that stabs her in her sore spots; it’s been a long time since anyone got their jollies at her expense.

 

“Sorry,” she mutters, because the words make her feel like an asshole even if the tone makes her want to smile.


	3. I don’t like you enough to put it into smaller words.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Illustration 1 by [wolveswithhats](http://wolveswithhats.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Illustration 2 by [kylathelurker](http://kylathelurker.livejournal.com/)

_When I was first called I used to have recurring dreams about drowning. After I defeated the Master, Giles thought they might have been slayer dreams, but they never really stopped, just became less frequent. In the dream I would be swimming, the water choppy and dragging at my clothes. I was afraid of something, something behind me, chasing me, and I could feel it getting closer, my arms and legs getting tired, but I knew if I could just make it to the shore I’d be safe._

_It always caught me. Thick, slimy tentacles wrapped around my waist and ankles, dragging me under until I woke up thrashing, covered in sweat._

_After he lost his soul, the monster wore Angel’s face, and when he pulled me under I would kick and scratch and struggle so hard I’d sometimes put gouges in my own skin. But when my friends brought me back from heaven, then… then the monster was me. I let her take me down without a fight, more often than not._

_I haven’t had that dream in a long time. I don’t know whether that means I’ve conquered whatever it is I was afraid of, or if I’ve simply given up. Maybe you reach a point of having lost so much you just aren’t capable of fear anymore, or maybe I got so good at turning around to embrace the monster that…_

_Or maybe the monster just didn’t want to kill me anymore. Not like it would be the first time. But then I have to wonder, given all its various forms, why it never once came to me with platinum hair and a dangerous smirk. Maybe it knew… some part of me… I was never afraid of_ him.

 

***

 

In the wasteland she feels stripped bare. Which is dumb, because she’s wearing more layers than three normal outfits combined. But there’s something about the way the sky never gets completely dark, even after sunset, how the snow seems to make everything luminous, and how it stretches out to the horizon in a flat swath of white… There’s nowhere to hide, and the fact that they don’t set out immediately? Only makes things worse. She’s eager, itching for action, desperate for the _purpose_ of having somewhere to go. No such luck.

 

“I’m really more action-girl than navigation-girl,” she protests when Bridget unrolls the map on her scratched and pitted kitchen table, but she rides right over Buffy with a flat _don’t care_.

 

“If something happens to me out there you’ll be on your own. You need to know what to do.”

 

It’s the same reasoning that’s had Buffy learning the dog calls – _gee, haw, on by, line out_ – and enduring the euphemistic delight that is ‘hypothermia training.’ Bridget had enjoyed watching her throw herself into a deep patch of freezing water far too much, but afterwards she’d conceded that Buffy could call her ‘Bridge’ so she guessed they were friends now; kind of still hard to tell.

 

Looking at the map Buffy traces a finger along the Alaskan shoreline, and it occurs to her that something doesn’t quite add up. “The North Pole’s over here, right? So why are we setting off from Endurance and not somewhere closer, like in Canada?”

 

Bridge actually looks impressed. Buffy tries not to be pleased.

 

“We’re not going to the geographic or magnetic North Pole.”

 

“There’s more?”

 

“Ever heard of ley lines? They’re channels of mystical energy that traverse the globe. They converge in the Arctic, up here somewhere.” She gestures to a patch of ocean much closer to their location.

 

“A _magical_ North Pole?” Buffy asks, but, well. Why not? It probably wouldn’t even make the top ten weirdest things Buffy’s ever heard of relating to magic. “Willow’s going to be so mad she missed this one.”

 

Willow. Oh. The inadvertent intrusion into the conversation of the best friend she hasn’t seen in nearly a year makes her quiet and downcast, and as soon as they’re done she steps outside of the squat little wooden house and trudges down the pathway cut into the snowdrifts. Bridge lives beyond the edge of town, an outcast among outcasts. Does that make Buffy – the barely tolerated houseguest – a triple outcast? It wouldn’t be a million miles away from what she’s feeling.

 

She climbs the low rise behind the house and looks out at the clustered lights of Endurance, hunkered down and half-buried in snow. The strip of pink on the horizon marks the perpetual twilight. It must be pretty late to be as dark as it is, but time has started to lose meaning for her. Turning away, she stares instead out into the tundra, a vast expanse of nothingness, glowing like the moon and blanketed in velvet blue sky, a scattering of stars just barely visible. She feels herself acutely – hands, arms, puffing lungs – one small woman in all the world.

 

“How do you live like this?” she asks the footsteps that come up behind her some thirty minutes later. “Doesn’t it drive you nuts?”

 

Bridge grunts. “This is nothing. This is _nice._ Give it another month and the sun won’t set at all; less, where we’re going.” Buffy feels the weight of her gaze, studying her, before she continues. “Not quite what you meant, though, is it? The old folks say the tundra is a mirror. You having trouble facing yourself, Slayer?”

 

“What?” Buffy turns to her. “Why would you call me that?”

 

Bridge shrugs. “It’s what you are, isn’t it? More than me. More even than any of the others, I’d wager. Not hard to see, after spending some time with you. Slaying is something that just happened to me – didn’t want it, don’t usually do anything about it – but you, it’s your life.”

 

“You’re wrong,” Buffy says, shaking her head with a smile that starts out wry but twists into something else altogether. “I’m retired. I teach now, I train the new girls. I’m only here because the forces of evil seem to have decided to go into overdrive and we couldn’t spare anyone else.”

 

Bridge just looks at her with shrewd brown eyes. “Which brings us back around to the question you’re trying to avoid.”

 

“I am not trying to avoid…!” She huffs, annoyed now. “And I don’t actually know what you were talking about. It doesn’t look very mirrory to me.”

 

“Yeah? If you yelled right now into that,” she gestures expansively at the snow receding into the distance, “and you heard someone yelling back, you tell me, is it more likely to be some nomad out there in his igloo, or an echo of your own voice?”

 

Buffy thinks about that a moment.

 

“Huh?”

 

Bridget rocks back and forth on her heels, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of her parka. “Nah,” she says eventually, “I don’t like you enough to put it into smaller words. You’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.”

 

*

 

And that’s the other thing. Bridget has this way of looking at her as though she’s a bug under the microscope. She’s not used to being so intensely interesting to someone, not anymore. And isn’t that kind of weird behavior for a loner, supposedly more interested in her dogs than her neighbors? It’s weird, _she’s_ weird, and Buffy starts to feel like every conversation is a minefield.

 

She would escape into the town, visit the shop, maybe get a coffee and check her email, except with the wind coming in off the tundra, the drifts can build up to waist height or more in just a couple of hours and she doesn’t fancy getting stuck on foot having to wait for Bridget’s rescue. Yet somehow, when Bridge drives her tank of an SUV down for supplies, Buffy finds herself refusing the ride just for the chance to be alone in the house.

 

She spends more and more time out among the kennels with the dogs, Midnight her favorite and Roxie the lead dog, slipping them treats despite her host’s dire warnings just so she can bury her hands in their deep, soft fur and feel uncomplicated connection to another living creature.

 

She writes letters in her head, to Dawn, to Xander and Willow, to… others, but never _actually_ writes them.

 

And several times a day, no matter what they’re doing, her eyes will come to rest of their own accord on the white, white landscape surrounding them in every direction. It beckons to her, the way the long drop off a tall tower once did; frightens her in the same way. It doesn’t sit well with her, though, being so afraid of something so patently unscary, and so she prods at that place inside that shies away with the same irresistible urge as poking her tongue at a sore tooth. Poking her fingers into a gaping wound.

 

She’s never been more palpably, achingly lonely.

 

*

 

Maybe that explains it.

 

“Come on, continental, get your ass out of bed.” There are definitely nicer ways to be woken than shaken roughly at an hour of the morning that shouldn’t exist, but Buffy hauls herself into her clothes practically on reflex before registering an objection.

 

 “What’s going on?” she asks, sparing a thought for the fond remembrance of curling tongs.

 

“You should probably see this,” is all Bridge says, and Buffy stumbles out after her, fearing the worst.

 

Outside, the first thing she notices even above the cold is that the snow has turned green. She squints, then rubs her eyes. “I feel like there’s a Greenland joke in here somewhere,” she mutters, mentally reviewing where her weapons are.

 

“Look up,” Bridget says witheringly. She does. And it becomes clear. Wow.

 

Draped across the sky is a ribbon of fuzzy green light, undulating slowly like a charmed cobra.

 

“What— Is that magic?” She can’t help but think of Dawn. Her heart speeds up. “Is it the warlocks?”

 

“No. People used to think it was magic. Spirits, gods. Turns out it’s just a bunch of space junk getting caught in the earth’s magnetic field. Pretty, though.” There’s a pause, tinged with embarrassment. “Figured you should see it. It’s bright for this time of year, might be your last chance.”

 

Realization comes. “The northern lights.”

 

She’s right, it is really, really pretty. As they watch, the green seems to solidify along one edge so that it looks more like a curtain billowing in the breeze. Violet and red flare up along the edges before fading, reappearing elsewhere. The light seems alive, streaming upwards into the heavens, and the swelling urge to reach her arms up, to throw herself after it, overtakes her for a moment before subsiding.

 

To her mortification, Buffy realizes she’s crying.

 

 

*

 

For once, Bridget doesn’t twist the knife, just quietly leaves her to it. The tears don’t last long, as out of practice as she is, and by the time Buffy’s wiping her face she’s managed to convince herself it was just the wind and the bitter cold making them water.

 

She stays out, though, watching until the colors fade into the lightening sky, wishing, and wishing, and longing, and sorry.

 

How totally tragic is it, that her reaction to something beautiful is to have her carefully reconstructed heart scooped out again? Feeling paper thin and hollow, with the sun skirting the horizon, Buffy turns and goes back indoors.

 

Bridget is sitting at the table doing something with a tangle of dog harnesses, a bottle of clear liquid and two empty shot glasses sitting in front of her. The husky at her feet raises its head at Buffy’s entrance before padding over – each night Bridge takes two indoors on a roster, and they’re sociable creatures but not exactly pets. This one is a wheel dog called Artemis, so big and muscly she unsteadies Buffy when she nuzzles her hand in greeting, and Buffy feels again how small she is, how insubstantial.

 

“You drink?” Bridget asks without looking up.

 

“Not usually,” Buffy replies, but has unscrewed the cap and poured for them both before she’s even sat down.

 

*

 

They’ve been at it half an hour or so, and Buffy is starting to feel pleasantly warm for the first time all week, but she’s never been able to hold her liquor – or maybe just never learned to go slow – the sour shock of it on her tongue still making her grimace. At first they don’t talk much, in what Buffy is optimistically thinking of as a companionable silence, but even though Bridget’s focused on her task, Buffy can still feel her attention like an itch on her skin. In the end, scratching is mandatory.

 

“You said your… the… people used to think the northern lights were spirits?”

 

A grunt of assent. “Some still do.”

 

“Spirits like evil demonic possession spirits?”

 

“You mean like the _pigiitchuat_? No. _They_ summon evil spirits from the abyss. These are supposedly spirits from… heaven, I guess. The afterlife.”

 

“Good spirits?”

 

“They play football with a walrus skull.” Bridget shrugs. “Just people spirits, I think.”

 

“Huh.” Buffy gets a sudden mental image of her mom in the long white gown Dawn had once described seeing her in, kicking a walrus skull around with her bare feet. It doesn’t sound anything like where she went, after Glory – where she’s certain her mom went, too. Disturbed, she shakes the vision off. “What’s the abyss? Like a demon dimension?”

 

At her question, there’s a long pause from the other side of the table, but vodka for breakfast seems to make it more thoughtful than hostile. Then, like water flowing after ice-break, Bridge talks.

 

“You’re asking the wrong person, Summers. Half a foot in neither world, that’s me – never learned the proper Inuit ways and never got or wanted a slayer’s education. Haven’t got a clue what a demon dimension is, and as for the abyss, all I can tell you is the half-remembered stories I heard at my grandparents’ summer camp. The old woman and the bear, Raven who made the land and sea… It’s strange,” she takes a moment to examine the fingers of her right hand, spread out like a fan, “I remember the place more clearly than the words, the smell of the sod and how my fingers were always stained purple from berry picking. Then in the evenings, we’d sit around and eat, and Taata would tell us stories in Inuktitut, but I barely speak it anymore, so I don’t really remember…

 

“The world – they thought it was flat – was supposed to be covered in this hard dome, and beyond that is the abyss. It’s just… nothingness. But sometimes evil, too. They thought the aurora was a pathway that led through a small hole in the dome, over the abyss and into heaven, but it was narrow and treacherous, and not everyone made it. My Aana always warned us: don’t die on a dark night, because the spirits who light the way along the path, with their green and red and purple lanterns, have all gone away, and the abyss will try to claim you.”

 

 

“And you don’t think there’s anything to it?” Buffy asks, picking idly at the label of the bottle. “Giles is always saying about – the thing with teeth? Oral – oral history – with magic and whatnot, how it’s more true than most people realize.”

 

This is the most they’ve talked since Buffy arrived, she’s well aware of that, just as she’s aware that previously she was perfectly fine with it. But right now? Somehow silence is worse than the sound of another woman’s low, gruff voice. And anyway, maybe there’ll be something useful in all this cultural information – that’s what Dawn would say. You never know, where magic’s involved.

 

Bridge snorts softly and stretches, drawing her straight black hair into a ponytail that she holds at the back of her head for a moment before releasing. “My Aana and Taata believed they could personally call the aurora into being, talk to those torch-bearing spirits, send messages to the dead.” Buffy feels her focus narrow abruptly, fingers turning lax so that her glass slips from her hand to clunk on the tabletop. “Superstitious nonsense,” Bridget concludes, meeting her eyes with uncomfortable knowing. “Just like the rest of it.”

 

“But what if—?”

 

“Believe me.”

 

There’s something bitter in those two words, and so painfully familiar that all Buffy can say is, “Oh.”

 

Bridget reaches over to refill their drinks before downing hers. The slam of the empty shot glass on the table has an air of finality about it, and so Buffy is unprepared – wholly unprepared – for any kind of continuation.

 

"So what did you do?" Bridget asks, her tone curious, almost mocking. “No one chooses to come this far north without a damn good reason and you look like a runner to me."

 

“Um, power hungry pig-people ringing any bells?”

 

Bridge just shakes her head with a sardonic smile. "What are you afraid of, hotshot? No point in denying it. Alaskans have Fear instead of God, we know what it looks like, and I know that you are.”

 

And maybe it’s the shock of the question coming straight out of left field, but it jolts Buffy’s brain into fragile, crystalline honesty, and she thinks, _The way time presses on my chest. The way I wake up and it's like that. The knowledge of the day; the fact of it; that there’ll be one following it, and one after that. The way he died to give me this time and now all I have is hours._  
  
_The way I feel like I need a vacation from the vacation of my life, where I party and shop and sleep with a cute guy who's good for information but probably not_ good _, because this time instead of hatred and self-loathing I feel such a well of grief that I can’t come near it without it threatening to swallow me whole._  
  
"We're slayers," she says. "We don't get the luxury of being afraid."  
  
She turns away, looks out the snow-crusted window onto the tundra. Taking this mission was supposed to have been a break, some well needed violence to snap her out of it... it… whatever _it_ was. She'd meant for it to be that. But she probably should have known; how many breaks can one person take before coming full circle? Because here, too, there is nothing but snow and herself and the weight of time.

 

 


	4. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.

_The night after our little chat, I dream of following that glowy green pathway high up into the sky. I have a message to deliver, but everywhere I look is deserted. I mean, it’s the sky, so – duh.  But it makes sense in the dream. I finally find him in a dark room, some weird little space with the stars turned off._

_“I can’t see you,” I say, and even though he doesn’t answer I know he’s there. “I have to tell you something, it’s important.”_

_“Shh now, pet,” he says. “It’s too late.”_

_Then I see him, his back pale as the snow in moonlight, draped over a cross. “Shouldn’t you be burning?” I ask._

_“Too late for that, too.”_

_I will him to turn around, show me his face, but he doesn’t, and I can’t move._

_Then we’re in the old Sunnydale crypt, lying spooned together half beneath the rugs. We’re naked, and his body is pressed all along my back, his knees against the backs of mine, his arms cradling me close, his lips pressing kisses to my neck. I feel so happy I can barely hold it all in, but I don’t dare move in case he stops._

_“Why’re you crying?” he murmurs into my skin. I wasn’t until then. “What did you do?”_

What did you do? _comes Bridget’s soft echo._

_Easy._

_“I lived.”_

_“Ah sweetheart, don’t do this. We’re both free now, made sure of that.”_

_But I don’t feel free, and he’s gone. Even in the dream these things are indelible. “Free of life? Got another name for that.”_

_He’s quiet then, withdrawing his touch, but when I roll over to apologize, to cling tighter, to kiss him, it’s over._

 

***

 

She wakes thinking – inexplicably – of Andrew, and that answering machine message from Giles with the news that he was handing the boy over to them for a time. It was the same night she’d met the Immortal, trying to slay him in the private area of a swanky club because he set off her demon tinglies.

 

Funny how it can never just be one thing followed, sometime later, by another. No, in Buffy-world everything always runs together, a deluge of this and this and, oh, this too, with never any time to come up for air.

 

It only occurs to her for the first time now, as she rubs the sleep wearily from her eyes, that maybe that has less to do with the never ending carousel of evil that is her life, and perhaps, maybe, more to do with _her_.

 

*

 

“But why _here_?” Buffy whined, happily switching roles with the actual teenager for the satisfaction of a good grump. “Wouldn’t we all be happier if he had his own space? Like, say, on the other side of town?”

 

“C’mon, Buffy, you heard Giles – Andrew’s depressed. He’s probably got that survivors’ guilt thing Dr. Kaur was talking about.” Buffy took a moment to silently curse that woman, her psychobabble, her appointment to the Academy, and her very existence; as if her sister needed any more ammunition. “He needs to be around people who care about him.”

 

“And again I ask: _here_?”

 

Dawn just rolled her eyes and that, it seemed, was that. Andrew appeared the following day with a single small suitcase and a hangdog expression that barely lifted on discovering their new PlayStation2, made himself comfortable in their living room, and didn’t look likely to be on his way any time soon.

 

At least he baked. And tidied. In fact, sometimes invasively so. Buffy took to locking her bedroom door when he went on one of his benders lest he arrange her underwear drawer by color again. But on the whole he made himself useful, what with the hot meals and regular laundry runs – she and Dawn hadn’t been so well catered to since before Mom got sick, and there was something undoubtedly refreshing about that.

 

He’d put on weight since they last saw him in Oxford, losing the stretched-out teenage boy look. He was quieter, too, more serious – something that could only be of the good, in Buffy’s opinion, especially since she’d been dreading having to deal with that slightly terrifying hero-worship thing he had going. He talked more to Dawn than to her, anyway, and when he did it was only about day to day stuff, occasional questions about the Academy, the odd bit of research. In fact, he spent half his time with his nose in some musty old tome or other that Dawn would retrieve for him from the library. He never tried to talk about things she couldn’t… wouldn’t… He turned out to be a good opponent on Tekken 4, or better than Dawn, at least.

 

She saw, for the first time, what Giles said he saw. Beyond the silly dreamer, something that might one day become a half-decent watcher.

 

“I actually don’t know what the problem is,” Buffy admitted to Dawn one morning as they were making breakfast, Andrew still sacked out on the couch in the next room. “I like him better like this.”

 

Dawn turned to her slowly, her whole body swiveling as though on gears. It would have been funny, except for the unpleasant expression on her face, a mix of disdain and incredulity. “ _Suicidal?_ ” she asked.

 

“What? I – _What?”_

 

“Guess you didn’t bother listening to that part of the message, huh?” She hadn’t. She’d been too intent on calling Giles back to try and talk him out of it. Somehow the reason behind the decision had failed to come up. “He tried to top himself, Buffy. He’d just been released from the psych ward when he came here.”

 

“Oh.” Inside, something angry and sneering raised its head, but rational-Buffy knew that that was Wrong and so she swallowed it back down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

 

Dawn just stared at her some more before shaking her head. “It’s not all about you, you know,” she muttered, before snatching up her Pop Tart and shoving past. Buffy didn’t try to stop her. She didn’t know what to say.

 

It was a week or so afterwards that she was sneaking in from a secret not-patrol of the tourist quarter when she heard their voices coming from the lounge. Frowning at the lateness of the hour, and on a school night too, she stopped by the door to listen in.

 

“-better,” Andrew was saying. “I still think about her sometimes, though. Sometimes I talk to her, like she’s really there. Pretty lame, right?”

 

“No, not really.” That was Dawn. “Dr. Kaur told me to try writing a letter.”

 

Buffy tensed. She remembered that – Dawn had wanted her to try it too. Another pointless fight.

 

“Did it help?”

 

A pause. “Some.” She could practically _see_ Andrew’s narrow-eyed nod. Dawn added, “I got angry and burned it.”

 

“Angry at him?”

 

“Angry at me.”

 

“I get that,” Andrew said softly. “Every day, before I… before I tried to… I would think to myself, Anya died a hero’s death. I’m alive because of her. I should be treasuring every second. But instead I… and then I felt guilty, for not doing better.”

 

There was a faint rustling and Buffy pictured Dawn reaching out to him – always reaching out – hand on his shoulder or arm.

 

“Did it get better? Do you still feel like that?”

 

A choked, wet-sounding _yes_ was all Buffy could take before turning right back around and leaving them to it.

 

Her first reaction had been right after all, she thought, swiping at her eyes as she thundered down the stairs of their apartment building. He was weak, just like Chloe had been weak. As if no one else had—

 

Of course you could treasure the seconds, you just had to _try_. Andrew was pathetic, he was… _profane_ , and god, she hoped Xander never had to hear him talking about Anya’s memory like that, like he had any right to—

 

She’d go see Giancarlo. Yes. Tell him he could take her out to lunch after all. Tell him he could take her tomorrow, beg him if she had to. Tell him, maybe, to let her stay the night, because otherwise she’d have to go back to _that_ , and tomorrow wouldn’t come soon enough.

 

*

 

Buffy rises to find the house empty, and moves about slowly, drifting and blank as snow. Eventually, the sound of barking draws her out, coffee in hand, and there is Bridge beside the dog shed, loading up the sled. Her heart skips a beat when she realizes what it means. With the start of May bearing down on them and the twilit night down to a couple of hours, she’d known they couldn’t wait much longer, but still, the sense of relief is immense; movement will help, she’s certain.

 

For a while, it does. The sound of dogs barking, the wind in her face, the prickle and sting of the sparkling fog kicked up from undisturbed powder – all these things spell freedom, release. Having to jump off and run alongside the sled when it flounders on wet snow is a joy so fierce she finds herself grinning beneath her face-mask like a wolverine, and the burn in her lungs from the freezing air is a pleasant kind of pain. She’s so pent up she could run all day, and has to rein in her annoyance when it’s time to jump back on board again. That night she sleeps like the dead, and doesn’t dream.

 

It’s like that for the first week, and then, abruptly, it isn’t. They’re heading due north and really into twenty-four-hour sun territory now, so it’s kinda hard to name it ‘morning’ because that implies some kind of night came before it, but Buffy wakes one day and the mindless simplicity of it all is just gone. She lies in her sleeping bag staring at the tent wall, fighting desperately against the upwelling of dread until Bridget stirs and they start their day.

 

A day in which there’s no sound but their breath and the dogs’ panting and the metallic hiss of the sled on snow, nothing to see but land so white it makes her eyes ache. That raw, wide-open feeling creeps over her again, that fear-fascination for the emptiness of the landscape, until she feels bowed under the weight of it, silence buzzing in her ears. Maybe it’s in self-defense that her focus turns inward, but her mind quickly takes her back to thoughts of Andrew, and Anya, and the fifteen-year-old girl they lost to a demon just last month, and from there a progression of images and memories she would rather not have but can’t seem to escape, until she’s seeing in fire.

 

*

 

“Why are you doing this?” Buffy asks later. She means it more as distraction than interrogation, but it comes out accusatory anyway, and she wonders briefly if she’s lost the ability to have a simple conversation without layers and layers of subtext.

 

Bridge is terse as she sets up the camp stove for what could laughably be called dinner. “This?”

 

“World saveage,” Buffy clarifies.

 

“What, am I horning in on your gig, Slayer?” She has that vaguely annoyed look on her face again, the perma-frown, and it chafes at the part of Buffy that was just trying to be friendly.

 

“Stop calling me that,” she snaps, surprising herself by the rancor in her tone. “I mean,” she stumbles back on track, “you don’t care about sacred duty. You pretty much hate all things slayerly. Half the time I think you hate _me_...”

 

“Half the time I do.”

 

The words hang there like the small, white sun above the horizon, unexpectedly piercing, until Bridget looks away. Buffy senses that neither of them intended the conversation to take this fractious turn, but here it is nonetheless: the ice and the snow and the sky shouting back.

 

“I’ll tell you about sacred duty,” Bridget mutters harshly, and when she meets Buffy’s eyes again there’s something dark and bleak and furious in them, and suddenly the tent feels very small. “What use are super powers when the only thing worth saving is already gone? You flounce in here with your lip gloss and your hero complex and expect me to be grateful for this thing? I don’t think so, _Slayer_.”

 

Inside Buffy, everything unravels.

 

“Well I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry you hate it. I’m sorry it’s such a burden to you. I’m composed entirely of sorryness. But there was no choice. The world was going to be destroyed and this was our only chance to stop it. There was no time to think about consequences, I admit it, all right? But don’t go acting as though I’ve come out of this golden. I lost the man I – I lost my man –” and suddenly she’s panting, heaving for breath, because she hasn’t said it before, not out loud, and the words claw at her throat but she can’t keep them in. “He died. He died to save the world. It’s because of him we’re here today, any of us. It’s a _gift_.”

 

Then the tent really is too small, and she can’t get out of there fast enough. She runs until she collapses, and on her knees in the snow she weeps and weeps until she’s screaming with it.

 

And later, when the energy has gone but not the tears, she lies on her back staring up at the clouds, soul so raw it’s circled back to numbness, eyelashes starting to freeze.

 

*

 

“Come on, continental, time to wake up now.”

 

The words seem to circle slowly around her head without penetrating, until she’s hauled up roughly into a sitting position, something warm and sweet pressed to her mouth.

 

She swallows, and asks groggily, “Did I fall asleep?”

 

“Yeah, and I’m your prince charming come to wake you up. You _idiot._ Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

 

 _I don’t know_ , she thinks, _I don’t know anymore._ But he didn’t save her life just so she could waste it. This is the thing she tells herself over and over in the dark of the night, when she questions what she’s doing – in Rome, in her life, in bed with Giancarlo. She’s been trying so hard, and never once dared wonder, _what if I’m just making the same mistakes all over again?_ And now there’s no night, no dawn at which everything seems brighter, just tangled, difficult truth spilling out in the searing light of this permanent day, and she has no idea how to stuff it back in.

 

“I feel so lost,” she murmurs, and when she opens her eyes she realizes she’s propped up _on_ Bridget, slumped like a discarded toy in her ridiculous red jacket, and the other woman’s face – what she can see of it – is ashen.

 

“Then next time take the GPS, or at least one of the damn dogs.”

 

On cue, something in the vicinity of her legs lets out a sharp snuffling sound, and Buffy creaks her neck down to see one of the huskies sprawled across her lower body.

 

“Midnight,” she says, and tries to reach up to pet him. Only then does she notice the pain, cold so deep it _hurts_. Snorting again, Midnight half-rises and shuffles up her body until he can lick at her chin, her jaw, the tears that Buffy didn’t even realize had started up again, looking up at her with soulful eyes that ask nothing of her except her continued survival. As a sled dog he’s pretty worthless, too lazy to pull his weight, so it’s beyond her why he’s on the team, but his gentle temperament means he’s always been her favorite. Warm, too. Oh god, so warm! Bridget makes her finish the drink and that combined with the husky blanket thaws her out enough to get her limbs moving again.

 

“Think you can walk?” Bridge asks, pulling her to her feet. “I can go get the sled, but it’s better for you if you do.” The wind is whipping up, sharp in their faces, and Buffy steadies herself on the other woman’s shoulder as she shivers convulsively.

 

“I can walk,” she says between chattering teeth.

 

Wordlessly, Bridge slips a supporting arm around Buffy’s waist and they turn back in the direction of their tracks, Midnight leading the way. It only strikes her later, with the tent in view, that Bridge isn’t overly fond of Midnight, which means she must have brought him for Buffy’s sake. She doesn’t know what to do with that information.

 

*

 

That night (and for once it even feels a little like it, with the sun behind thick grey cloud) Buffy lies quiescent in her sleeping bag, watching as Bridget goes through her routines, checking equipment, re-packing supplies, setting the alarm. It’s strangely soothing and she feels quiet within herself.

 

“Who did you lose?” she asks, for the sake of both curiosity and parity. Bridget’s hands pause long enough to make regret rise up in her, always so close to the surface these days, but she speaks before Buffy can take it back.

 

“My son.”

 

Buffy’s breath hitches, a sympathetic stab of heartache, and nods. _I’m sorry_ doesn’t cover it, no words do, and so she says none. Bridget will tell her more, or she won’t – pointless to wonder anymore if they’re friends when they’re all the other has right now, here at the top of the world.

 

They’re quiet together for a moment more before Bridget speaks without turning to her. “Did you love him?”

 

No need to ask who.

 

“Yes.” The word comes out on a long breath like a hiss, and she feels her mouth vibrating with it, tongue and teeth and palate. Her bones vibrate with it. Her whole architecture shakes and trembles for the admission that streams out now like steam from a pressure valve. “Yes, I loved him.  More than I ever knew was possible.”

 

“But if love was enough, they’d be here right now, wouldn’t they.”

 

No words cover it.


	5. Don’t die on a dark night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Illustration 1 by [kylathelurker](http://kylathelurker.livejournal.com/)
> 
> Illustration 2 by [bewildered](http://dark-solace.org/elysian/viewuser.php?uid=14026)

 

_He would get nightmares sometimes, before the soul. I mean, after the soul it was a given, but then? Not so much. I would get angry with him when he did, though I never knew why. Didn’t think about it. Pretended to be asleep or got up and left. I hated the way he would cry my name, reaching out for me in sleep, always reaching out. I think they were dreams about falling, about death and portals and failure, and the times I played possum I would lie there and remember, what he said to me before it all got twisted up between us –_ every night I save you.

_I hated that he felt everything and I felt nothing. I hated that the only time I felt anything at all was with him. I guess I thought, part of me – when I wasn’t too busy insisting that he couldn’t really feel at all, just so I could know that I was worse than a soulless monster – I guess I thought he was so full of emotion, brimming over with it, that I could catch some of it from him._

_Catch it. Like a disease or something. I was so dumb. Because in the end what he made me feel again was love, and now I can’t get rid of it._

***

 

They’ve been three weeks on the ice and are almost at their destination when Buffy wakes with a jolt. It takes her a minute of listening to Bridget’s even breathing, the whistling of the wind outside, before she realizes what’s wrong. Struggling out of her sleeping bag into the frigid air she starts yanking on clothing, yelling at Bridge to wake up.

 

Outside, the sky is dark. Not like how it is sometimes, with the sun hanging low on the horizon and filtering feebly through thick cloud: now it’s dark like night, a black expanse of sky like Buffy hasn’t seen since she landed north of the Arctic Circle.

 

They stand there a moment, side by side and perfectly still, until Bridge curses and pulls the GPS out of her pocket.

 

“Damn it,” she mutters after a moment. “We’ve drifted.”

 

“And that’s bad?”

 

“Yeah,” she breathes, glancing up at the sky again. “We’re on sea ice, so we’re shifting around a bit day to day, but… Shit. We’ve been coming up a ley line to hide our approach from the _pigiitchuat,_ but we’ve drifted nearly ten miles off course since last night.”

 

It doesn’t take the genius she isn’t to figure out what that means. “They know we’re coming.”

 

They both stare at the sky, a yawning black void free of stars, of moon, of anything.

 

“You think?”

 

*

 

They’d still been over a day’s run from the coven as it stood, and further now, but it’s an easy decision to take the last leg in one go, straight through. Digging out the tent and packing up the sled together, Buffy thinks they’ve never been so in synch.

 

The wind picks up until it’s howling in her ears, the roar of it filling the world. Snow blows in almost sideways and she pulls up her face mask and pulls down her hat and hood until the only part of her exposed is a narrow strip across her eyes, lashes so thick with ice it aches to blink.

 

Time goes in weird chunks as the cold and the exhaustion settle in, sometimes five minutes between checks, sometimes two hours. Around the time they would usually stop to put up the tent for the night, the snow eases, the clouds begin to clear and the stars come out. With it comes the aurora.

 

The darkness makes the light shine brighter, and it is so, so beautiful. Buffy lies back on the sled to take it all in, all the bright dome of the sky. Funny how in the daylight everything seemed so flat and empty; in the dark there’s a grandeur to it all, and it feels somehow familiar.

 

It might be magic, and it might be bad news, but it’s only after weeks and weeks of sunlight that she appreciates the night for what it is.

 

*

 

She must sleep, because eighteen hours into their run Bridge is shaking her awake and the dogs have stopped, milling around with tongues lolling out.

 

“We gotta walk," Bridge tells her, rummaging around beneath the tarp and withdrawing a pole with a long barb on the end. “Midnight smelled water.”

 

“Aren’t we, you know, _surrounded by_ water?” she asks distractedly, stamping her feet – sleeping in the open, not good. Inside her bunny boots, her feet have gone numb.

 

“Smartass,” Bridget says without rancor. “He can smell liquid water beneath the ice. Means the ice is too thin.” She huffs, spearing the ground in front of them before deciding on a course. “Winter break up’s getting earlier every year,” she mutters. “Damn global warming. As if demons and vampires and whatever the hell else isn’t enough.”

 

Buffy trudges along in her wake, careful to follow her path precisely. She really, _really_ would like to avoid another dip in the frigid ocean. The lead pair is at her heels, and Buffy glances back at them, Roxie and Midnight, feeling a weird sense of gratitude for one mystery solved.

 

“You smell water, huh?” she says over her shoulder. Midnight seems to grin back at her. Every dog has its role in the team, she remembers.

 

All in all, as metaphors for her life go, tonight seems to be laying it on pretty thick.

 

*

 

They arrive all of a sudden. One moment, Buffy is driving the sled while Bridge takes a break. The next, the air shimmers like at Rack’s place and they’re driving into some kind of courtyard surrounded by a large, horseshoe-shaped building.

 

“Welcome,” says a woman whose choppy red hair reminds her joltingly of Vi but who turns out to be called Michaela. She explains briefly about the magical barriers protecting this place, then there’s activity everywhere as people appear to unpack the sled, feed the dogs, and Buffy’s fingers twitch for a weapon.

 

*

 

And isn’t that just…

 

After all this time in the bush or the wilderness or whatever she should call it, it turns out Buffy can’t remember how to be around people any more. Everything at the coven seems too loud, too warm, and the nape of her neck creeps so that she constantly seeks a wall at her back.

 

The building itself is an abandoned scientific outpost on a tiny island amid the sea ice, but inside the witches have made it pretty homey. She and Bridget are taken to adjacent rooms with a communal shower at the end of the corridor. Her room is carpeted and comfy, a hand-crocheted comforter on the bed. It all feels slightly absurd.

 

She showers in a daze, and sleeps for not long enough, and then there’s – _oh god_ – coffee and donuts, and plans to be made, but as soon as they break for five she’s outside in the courtyard leaning back against the wall and glorying in the quiet and the steaming of her breath.

 

“And this is how you end up living by yourself on the edge of a nowhere town with no one for company but your dogs,” she mutters to herself. Strangely, it isn’t enough to make her rush back in, and for now that’s just dandy.

 

*

 

She isn’t the only one feeling confined, though. The amount of time Buffy spends politely backing out of conversations, it’s pretty much inevitable she’d eventually find herself in the same hidey hole as the loner she rode in with.

 

“Hey,” she says, coming to stand beside her on the funny little observation deck attached to the commissary. Figures the only one she can tolerate for any length of time is Bridge.

 

“Hotshot. What’re you doing out here?”

 

She’s smoking one of the weird-smelling cigarettes she’d occasionally rolled for herself back home. She’s been smoking them a lot more since they arrived. Buffy envies her the excuse.

 

“Sky pretty,” she shrugs, and leans on her elbows against the railing. There’s no aurora, but the sky is clear as glass and the stars look like a painting. In the distance, an orange glow breaks the darkness, splashing fire across the frozen wasteland. “Is that them?” she asks.

 

 

“Yeah.” Bridge breathes the word out slowly with a lungful of smoke, as though savoring it. There’s something very watchful about her tonight, focused, and yet weirdly peaceful.

 

“Tell me about them,” Buffy says. “I know we’ve talked tactics and spells and weapons, but… how did this happen to them? They were people once, weren’t they?”

 

“Yeah, but they’re not really human, not anymore,” Bridge says, taking a long, unhurried drag, a little pop on the end as her lips release that is achingly familiar. “They make human sacrifices to summon bad spirits and let them possess their bodies.”

 

Bad spirits, does that mean – “Demons?”

 

Bridget shrugs.

 

“Sounds kind of like vampires,” she muses.

 

“Wouldn’t know, we don’t exactly get a lot up here. Stupid bastards don’t notice the cold and freeze solid. Never met one walking and talking.”

 

Buffy can’t help but snort softly at the image of Bridge staking vamp-sicles as they lay scattered across the snow. “I thought this was a one-time deal. Not been slaying on the sly, have you?”

 

Bridget huffs, looking uncomfortable and a bit guilty. “Don’t get excited, Summers, only ever seen a couple. I figure most of them dust when the sun comes back over the horizon.” Buffy opens her mouth to probe further, because god knows she needs to get her fun somewhere, but with a shrewd look Bridget flicks the butt into Buffy’s not-quite-empty coffee mug and changes the subject. “Do we need to talk about what happened a couple weeks back? You gonna try that crap again?”

 

And she’s done that thing again, where the sheer bluntness of the non-sequitur startles Buffy into honesty.

 

“No, I… no.” She sighs. “I get it now, what you meant about mirrors.” Bridge grunts, and Buffy feels the weight of her scrutiny. She meets her gaze levelly. “All that emptiness, it makes you face yourself, but… you already knew that, and you did it anyway.” She frowns in thought. “I don’t know why you don’t think you’re a slayer.”

 

Bridget is the first to look away, breath steaming. Her voice is very quiet when she speaks.

 

“What you’re made of, Buffy – I’m not made of that.”

 

There’s something here, in the tone of her voice, the set of her shoulders, the acceptance. It’s wrong somehow, but she can’t pinpoint it.

 

“You know,” she observes instead. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say my name.”

 

Then it hits her, in this strange little moment, that link to a severed past – it hits her right between the eyes and square in the heart, and she knows what’s wrong, _knows_ it, because hasn’t she been here before, in a basement that doesn’t exist anymore, with a man who only ever used her name when it was serious? Bridget doesn’t intend to survive the coming fight.

 

“Oh my god, _that’s_ what this is? This whole wise woman of the wilderness routine? Just a—” She is floored. “Just a death wish.”

 

Slowly, deliberately, Bridget straightens and turns to face Buffy head on, eyes shining with fury in the low light.

 

“My child is _dead_ ,” she says, words clipped and very precise. “ _They_ killed him. And six months later, I get the power and the opportunity? You’re damn right I’m going to go straight to the heart of them.”

 

“No,” Buffy insists fiercely, shaking her head. “Not like this. You told me, _you_ told me _,_ don’t die on a dark night.”

 

“It’s not really night, cheechako, we just had lunch,” she says, and the tone is too flippant, too knowing, and Buffy loses her composure all at once and hauls off and punches her. “Jesus fucking…!” Bridge steadies herself on the railing, glaring. “Shit, Summers. Didn’t know you cared,” she says, rubbing her jaw, and it’s deeply sarcastic but it’s still true, just like everything she says, and Buffy’s never been good at apologizing so instead she closes in and hugs her tight, this strange, prickly woman who was linked to her by magic but to whom she’s now connected by something far deeper, and wills herself not to cry again.

 

She told Dawn once, at a moment not unlike this one, that the hardest thing the world could ask of them was to live in it. It’s a lesson she’s had to teach herself over and over again, but to make this woman see it now – she doesn’t feel equal to it.

 

“Please,” she whispers. “Please don’t. We can win this. We will. We just have to fight for it.”

 

Bridget stands rigid for the longest time, then exhales shakily and tentatively lets her forehead fall to Buffy’s shoulder. “I’m so tired of fighting,” she whispers roughly. “How do you go on, when everything just gets stripped away?”

 

_Do all slayers go through this?_ she wonders, hearing her own words from years ago like a harmonic to Bridget’s empty question: _I don’t know how to live in this world if these are the choices._

 

“I don’t know, but you do. You have to. Because no one else will. And at some point, eventually, something will make it worth the struggle.”

 

She has to believe that; it was true before.

 

They disengage, and don’t meet each other’s eyes. Buffy bends down to scoop up a handful of snow for Bridget’s jaw and hands it to her awkwardly.

 

“I still hate you,” Bridge says, taking it.

 

“Yeah? Well I never said it before but I hate you too.”

 

Bridget laughs at that, honest to god laughs, and only then do the tears come.

 

*

 

Buffy stands aside and lets her weep without comforting noises or any of the coddling she’d give to Dawn. That’s the kind of person Bridget is (though when she winds down Buffy passes her the packet of tissues from her pocket so she doesn’t get all icy inside her nose).

 

It’s only when they go back inside for more coffee that Buffy connects a certain set of dots.

 

“You bitch,” she realizes. “This is why you made me learn all that survival stuff, so I could get home without you. It is, isn’t it!”

 

“Don’t be stupid,” Bridget tells her. “The ice will’ve melted back home by now.”

 

“Then how was I supposed to…?”

 

Bridge just shrugs. “I don’t know. Magic? Airplane? I’m sure you’d have figured it out.” She pauses a moment, eyes on her mug, before looking up at Buffy, defiant. “Don’t know what you think you saw just now, but I didn’t make any promises,” she says.

 

It sounds kind of like a promise all the same.

 

*

 

Buffy goes out by herself not long after, needing space to process it all. She doesn’t go far, and takes both Midnight and a GPS this time, but it’s enough distance to allow the lights from the coven to fade into a diffuse white glow and the stars to shine even brighter. Overhead the Northern Lights are starting up, strains of hazy green writhing against the splash of the Milky Way. She’s going to tell the others soon, when she goes back in, that tomorrow it’s time to attack. For now, she holds the knowledge inside herself, and tries to decide if she’s scared or eager. Either way, it’s time.

 

“So I don’t know if this’ll work,” she tells the aurora. “Bridge definitely isn’t a believer. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that magic is weird and powerful and… if there’s even a chance, I have to try to tell you.” And so she does, and thinks real hard about those spirits carrying her message across the boundary between worlds, because Giles has always stressed the importance of visualization.

 

Bridget told her – when? Last week? – that she’s been walking around as raw and obvious as a bloodstain on snow. Now, baring her soul to the judging silence of the land, far too late to truly do any good, in her red jacket with her broken heart, it’s exactly how she feels.

 

_Don’t die on a dark night_ , she thinks. But what if the darkness is carried inside?

 

Her words have trailed off as her thoughts turn ever inward, and so she isn’t sure exactly what she’s said and what she’s merely thought, but the aurora just then brightens and extends to something truly magnificent, the reds and violets flashing along the edge of that streaming curtain. Breathtaking. It feels like acknowledgement.

 

 

 


	6. That border at the edge of the campfire.

_I dream of him, the eve of the battle. We’re lying entwined on his narrow basement cot in Revello Drive. I feel aware, like when it’s a slayer dream, except this is different somehow – I don’t question it. Instead, we talk._

_“Stay awake,” he says. “Stay with me, Buffy.”_

_I burrow deeper into him. “I’m here.”_

_It’s still, so still and peaceful, and my thoughts slow down to match. I feel relaxed for the first time since… god, too hard to even know the answer to that. I don’t want to think of it now. He doesn’t even breathe, just like those nights, as though afraid of shattering the fragile peace. The only movement is the twitch of fingers, restless in the presence of skin: mine on his lower back, the slip of skin between waistband and t-shirt, his on the skin below the point of my jaw, hand buried in my hair and thumb stroking tender sweeps. We’re close, kissing distance, sharing a pillow, but while I see desire in his eyes, I don’t think it’s for that. I understand completely – after so long, I’m starved for the sight of him._

_“I’ve really missed you,” I say in a small voice. “Why wouldn’t you let me see you?” His thumb travels along my jaw to trace the bow of my lower lip and I close my eyes to savor it. “Where have you been?”_

_“Funny story, that,” he says. “Been helping the old man out in L.A. this last year.”_

_It’s not what I asked, but I go with it. “Angel? Why?”_

_A low, deep chuckle rumbles up from his chest and straight into mine. I push into it, greedy for all his sensations._

_“Nowhere else to go.”_

_“Oh.” That’s not right but I accept it for now. No point picking a fight when it’s just a dream._

_“Good that you’re here now, though, pet,” he says, pulling me closer to tuck my head under his chin, chest to chest, legs slotting together like puzzle pieces. “Got another big bad to take down tomorrow. Probably won’t see out the night, so it’s good to see your face one last time.”_

_“Weird,” I tell him. “I’ve got an apocalypse too.”_

_“That time of year.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_I murmur his name then, not to add anything, just to say it, and turn my face and press it into his neck, breathing in the scent of his skin. “I love you, you know.”_

_I feel the press of a kiss on the crown of my head and when I look up he’s giving me a sweet, sad little smile. “No you don’t, but thanks for—”_

_I push my fingers over his lips. “Don’t. I fought too hard to— just don’t.”_

_His eyes widen slightly, turning somber, before he kisses my fingers and pulls them from his mouth._

_“Okay. Guess it’s what I want to hear right now, anyway, given the circumstances.” He’s taken my hand and pressed it over his still heart. “Gonna be a big one, tomorrow’s fight. Don’t think I’ll be coming back from it.”_

_“What, again?” I ask wryly._

_The soft snort of his laughter stirs my hair and I smile, holding him tightly. “Hey, you’d be the one to—_

***

 

Someone pounds on Buffy’s door and she flails awake, distraught. “No!” But it’s gone, and in the end all she can do is get up and ready herself for battle.

 

*

 

“Hey, Dawn.”

 

The silence on the other end of the line feels way longer than it probably is. Buffy is weirdly on tenterhooks.

 

“It’s me.”

 

“Yeah, I figured,” Dawn snipes. “You’re alive, then.”

 

The flip statement feels unaccustomedly weighty after everything. How long has it been since they talked? Over a month, she thinks. It’s a little hard to tell if her sister really is still pissed with her or just putting on a show, but either way that’s not important right now.

 

“Yeah, I’m back in Endurance, and this payphone is really expensive so I don’t have long I’m afraid.”

 

A snort down the line. “Whatever. As if that’s anything new.”

 

“Dawn,” she says warningly, before taking a deep breath and trying to rein it back in. “How are you? Is Andrew back now?”

 

“Yeah he’s been back a couple of weeks.” She hears familiar whiny tones in the background, and Dawn’s response, “No, it’s just Buffy. Yeah, I’ll tell her.” A put upon sigh. “Andrew says hi and he’s sorry about your sock drawer.”

 

“My what?”

 

“Never mind, you’ll see when you get back.” She pauses. “Which will be…?”

 

“Um, tomorrow, I think? In the afternoon.”

 

“You want us to come get you?”

 

“No, the traffic’ll be bad.” The traffic’s always bad in Rome. “I’ll get a taxi.”

 

“Sure, if you want.”

 

She waits, gnawing her lip, but nothing more is forthcoming and this stilted conversation is killing her. “Listen,” she says, “Dawn, there’s something I want… I _need_ to tell you, and I don’t have much time so I’d like you to just listen, okay?”

 

The response is a little faster, a little more interested. “Okay…?”

 

Buffy takes a breath, and another, and then realizes how stupid she’s being, because she’s just faced down a small army of bad guys, seen the blood of the good guys painting the snow, heard her own screaming as Michaela went up in flames, and Bridge…

 

“I envied you,” she says all in a rush. “Because you could grieve and have regrets, and talk about it. I couldn’t talk about it because then I would have to feel it, how much I’ve lost. And I just… I’ve lost _so much_ , Dawnie, and nobody knew, so it just felt easier to keep it all locked away inside somewhere really deep. But I am grieving, Dawn, I am, it just hurts so much and I don’t know how to get over it.”

 

“Oh, Buffy,” Dawn says, suddenly gentle in that way she has of making Buffy feel as though she can lay aside the mantle of Sister-Mom for a few moments and just have a friend. It’s a dangerous feeling, and Buffy usually resists it, but this time she lets it be. “Maybe you’re not supposed to get over it. You know? Some things just change you, and... Feelings like that… maybe that’s just how it is. It’s not a crime to give yourself time to process it all.”

 

How did her little sister get so smart? Oh, right, about the same time she failed to build the cast-iron wall around her prickly, curled-up heart. “I’m so sorry,” she breathes.

 

“Don’t be,” Dawn tells her. “Look, all I ever wanted was for you to talk to me about it. It’s been really lonely.”

 

“I know. I know. I’m all scarred up inside, I don’t feel things like a normal person anymore. All I am is just lumpy, ugly scar tissue.”

 

“But at least you’re not empty, right?”

 

Buffy lets out a hiccupping laugh. “Yay me.”

 

“It’s definitely progress,” Dawn agrees dryly, then, more softly, “Are you… are you all right?”

 

“No, not really. But I guess I… I’m okay with that for now.”

 

There’s the faintest of question marks tacked to the end of her statement, but Dawn seems to hear it anyhow.

 

“Remember what Tara said? After mom died? Grief can be weird sometimes, and it’s okay to— _what?”_ There’s another pause and some rustling as Andrew seems to be trying to butt in to the conversation again, and Buffy looks around for a clock.“Oh my _god_ will you _can it?_ Sorry, not you, Buffy.”

 

“You know I left the key to the weapons chest in the—”

 

“In the side-table, I know. This is what happens when we limit his PS2 time.”

 

Buffy rolls her eyes to herself and cracks a small smile. Ah, normality. It might actually be good to get back to it, this time. “I need to get going, anyway. My plane…”

 

“And our credit card bill. Yeah, okay,” Dawn says reluctantly. “Thanks, you know. For trusting me.”

 

There’s a _finally_ in there, unspoken, and there’s an _it’s not that simple_ ready in response, but all Buffy says in the end is, “Thanks for not giving up on me.”

 

“Kinda hard, you do pay the rent.” She pauses, serious again. “We’re not done here, all right?”

 

But she knows that already. These things Dawn’s just said to her? These are things she’s been holding back for a while now. Buffy can tell. And now the floodgates have opened. They’ve barely even started.

 

*

 

A wet nose nudges at her fingers as she hangs up, and as Midnight tries to wriggle one last petting out of her, Buffy turns to find a familiar frowning face watching her impatiently.

 

“This isn’t the lower 48, you know,” Bridge says tersely. “The pilot won’t wait for you to make a dramatic last minute entrance.”

 

Buffy rolls her eyes fondly and crouches to give Midnight a quick squeeze before shouldering her rucksack and going over. The airport is just as tiny and tin-shacky as she remembers, but with her arm in a sling and leaning heavily on a crutch, Bridget seems somewhat smaller.

 

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” she asks. “I could stay a few more days, or get someone sent over to help you out until-”

 

“I’m fine,” Bridge says firmly, looking mildly offended. “I once walked five miles with a broken arm in knee-deep snow. I think I can manage a few strains and bruises.”

 

Bridge may hate it, Buffy thinks wryly, but there are definite advantages to slayerhood.

 

“And you’ll think about what I said, about getting some actual training?”

 

She just raises an unimpressed eyebrow. Buffy smiles a little falteringly. Eight years ago, when she’d been called, her watcher had assured her that she was one girl in all the world. Finding Kendra had been strange and wonderful and ultimately devastating. Finding Faith had been a mixed blessing at best, forever tinged with regret over the distance between them and the many reasons for it. Since then Buffy has personally met more slayers than anyone else in the world, but in the end, none of them has ever made her feel less alone. Funny how that works. All she ever gets are these strange, fleeting moments of connection before people pass out of her life forever, and she’s always struggled to love properly in these moments, the way people deserve, so hung up on the emptiness that has come before or will be sure to come after. The failure to love – and love well – and in the now – is the fulcrum around which many of her biggest regrets turn, and just as with the will to go on living, this is a lesson she must continually teach herself: that she is full of love, just as the First Slayer told her all those years ago; that she can give it freely, without proviso or condition, and should; that love is so much more than the blade to cut herself and others with; and that the risk is always, always worth it. It took coming to this frozen northern land for her to realize it this time, because it’s huge, and freezing, and she couldn’t have survived here on her own. But in the summer? Even the tundra blooms.

 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Buffy says a little thickly. “I’m not gonna try to hug you again.”

 

A small, wry grin nudges at the corner of Bridget’s mouth. “Good. Wasn’t really looking forward to another punch in the face.”

 

“Don’t tempt me,” Buffy tells her, and holds out her ungloved hand. Bridge just stares at it a moment, huffs an exasperated sigh, and abruptly envelopes Buffy like it’s competitive wrestling or something. Buffy blinks hard, recovers, and brings her own arms up to complete the circle, and suddenly it’s warmer and more caring than before, and just for a moment, as the skin of their faces presses side by side, Buffy feels the faint humming of that connection going back through the slayer line, that magical link she has only ever accessed once before, of the girls who came before, and the girls who will come after, and all the girls who never would’ve come at all without her. And just for that moment she feels bright and burning and at the center of it all, and she doesn’t feel alone, not one bit.

 

*

 

Buffy sleeps most of the way home, stumbling between flights like an under-caffeinated zombie. She took some injuries too, in the fight, but there’s more to recover from than just that. She only surfaces to eat like a famine victim, blearily stuffing her carry-on with Cheetos and peanut M&M’s at her connection at O’Hare, all that good stuff she hasn’t had in so long.

 

She wakes finally two hours out of Fiumicino with a body full of aches and a pain in her neck like a vamp took a bite out of her, and spends the remaining flight time staring unfocussed at a three-star rom-com that would definitely have benefitted from more fight scenes. Her mind drifts instead, because after her alarming strength, her remarkable self-involvement has always been a strong second, and she thinks about darkness and death, and how she carries them inside her. And it’s her job, yes, to hold life and death in her hands, but there are places darker still than the dead of night, and since the collapse of Sunnydale she’s been so dark inside, so desolate, that she hasn’t been able to see the way out. She has come to realize, at some point over the last few weeks, that some memories – some feelings – some _people_ – are not a deeper shadow but a light in that dark. Because she needs the dark, it’s part of who she is, but she needs the fire just as much.

 

Just as Sineya first did millennia ago, Buffy walks that border at the edge of the campfire, standing between her people and what terrors the night may hold. And sometimes it feels as though she can’t do anything without it resulting in her having even more to grieve for. And that’s just life. Dawn was right, as she so often is: that’s just how life is sometimes. The First Slayer told her once to risk the pain; she’s broken herself against that stony shore time and again, and that’s still just life. A hard life, for sure, but that’s why they made her strong. She’s a slayer. _The_ Slayer. She needs to get back to being it.

 

Rome, when she lands, is bright and warm and loud, but it doesn’t feel awful like it did at the coven. It feels welcoming; kinda homey. And oh, hey, the weather forecast is looking good for shorts later in the week. After so much cold and winter, her tan is definitely in need of a top up. She grabs a coffee and hails a cab and thinks with unashamed delight of the spa day she’ll be charging to the Council to recover from over a month’s lack of beauty regimen. Maybe she’ll convince Dawn to come with. Maybe even Andrew.

 

*

 

She hasn’t even put her suitcase down in the foyer of their apartment before Dawn is there, not running to give her a hug but shoving Andrew forward, jaw set and eyes oddly bright.

 

“Captain Dweeboid’s got something he wants to tell you,” she says, with enough menace that Buffy is momentarily impressed. Then Andrew starts talking and all she can do is stare and blink and wrap her fingers around the edge of the side-table to prove somehow that this is real.

 

Emotions howl through her like a hurricane. Anger – _rage_ – at Giles for manipulating her like this again. Disappointment. Fear. Hope. Love.

 

Oh god, _love_.

 

She quakes under the enormity of it.

 

“Buffy,” Dawn asks, shaking her shoulder almost angrily. “Are you listening? Andrew saw him. He’s alive.”

 

“Um, _was_ alive. Although our sources say the battle was a glorious—”

 

“Shut up!” Dawn yells, turning on him. “You don’t know. You don’t know anything for sure. Buffy, you have to call Giles, we have to find out—”

 

“I’ll go,” she says. “Right now. Dawn, book a ticket for L.A., I need to re-pack my suitcase.”

 

For a moment neither of them moves, and then Dawn breaks into a smile worthy of her namesake, and engulfs Buffy in a hug that smells of freshly-washed hair and feels like home. For the first time in so long, it feels like home.

 

“I love you,” Dawn says, “welcome back.”

 

Then, before Buffy can respond, she disappears again in a flurry towing Andrew behind her, and the small foyer is suddenly quiet and still. Lost for a moment, Buffy touches her face, throat tight, skin tight. The feeling burning through her is almost unbearable, because nothing is certain and this might all be for nothing after all, but of all the warring factions within her, it’s a smile that makes it to her face, and she can’t help but murmur, just for the pleasure and the hope of saying it,

 

“Spike.”


End file.
